


you're going to watch out for yourself (and so will i)

by anomalousity



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:08:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4679711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalousity/pseuds/anomalousity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>friendships within the raven squad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're going to watch out for yourself (and so will i)

“I don’t understand why you won’t just take it.”

He says it offhand, as though it’s something that’s okay to mention out of the middle of nowhere. They’re in the Hondayota, Adam and Gansey, and he’s fiddling with the cassette player to get to one of the less noisy songs Ronan had downloaded for him.

Pointedly, he pretends Gansey hadn’t spoken at all.

The thing about Adam Parrish is that he’s a particularly stubborn creature. Nothing will ever be enough and yet, charity is always too much. Adam acknowledges the fault in himself, though he doesn’t always believe it to be a fault. It’s just _Gansey_ , who looks for the best in people and pretends not to be disappointed when he’s given less than he’d expected. He forges unmentioned ultimatums that are met with guilt if not fulfilled.

Adam won’t, he refuses, to accept anything from Gansey if he carries on with this behavior; Adam knows it’s all but innate at this point.

He’s not fearful, per se, of accepting. He’s fearful of disappointing.  It’s that feeling, that fear, which prompts him to pull the car to the shoulder and put it in park. One of Ronan’s shitty organized-chaotic-garbage-songs is playing on the cassette, but Adam doesn’t bother with turning it down.

Gansey blinks at him when he lays his hand, palm up, on the armrest between their seats. After a moment, he lays his hand down on top of Adam’s. “It’s not because of you,” Adam says, squeezing Gansey’s palm.

Of course, Gansey knows him better than that.

He snorts. “And the sky isn’t blue.”

“I don’t understand why you insist on trying to ‘help’,” Adam pauses to retract his hand to make air-quotes. “I’ve said no plenty of times.”

Gansey rolls his eyes. “Just because you don’t want help now doesn’t mean you won’t later.” Then, “How come you let Ronan help?”

And that, Adam supposes, is the million dollar question.

He doesn’t know why he lets Ronan help. He supposes a big part of it might be the constant give and take of their relationship; Adam fixes the BMW, Ronan buys dinner. Adam helps Ronan with Literature and Physics, Ronan persuades the landlady at St. Agnes to discount his rent. Adam frames a man for murder, Ronan offers constant companionship and secrecy.

But it doesn’t explain why he lets Ronan persuade him to take half of his fries at the diner, or pay for his portion of the pizza at Nino’s when they all know he can’t afford it. Doesn’t explain why Ronan gets him gas more often than not, and doesn’t explain why Adam’s constantly willing to say ‘okay’ to Ronan, even if it puts him in a tight spot.

He supposes _that_ , at least, is the same for Gansey (and Blue and Noah).

“I don’t know,” Adam replies, breaking still silence. He glances down at Gansey’s hand, dangling limply over the cup holders. “It’s Ronan.”

“It’s Ronan,” Gansey echoes, as though it means something more than it does.

Maybe it does.

“You know…” Gansey starts, and Adam looks up to find his eyes focused on the dash, glasses shrouding what is surely a curious expression, though Adam wishes he hadn’t such a thorough understanding of him. “You know that it’s fine, right? I don’t consider it a burden, or whatever.”

Adam sighs and slumps in his seat. “I know,” he replies. He fiddles with the buckle of his seat belt until it finally snaps open, slapping against his shoulder hard enough for him to wince. “It’s just-”

“I’m not Ronan,” Gansey interrupts.

Adam knows he’s not. But he _is_ Gansey and Gansey’s a very special person to be.

“You don’t need to be.”

* * *

Blue grits her teeth together as the speedometer glides from one-hundred to one-hundred-ten miles-per-hour. Her fingers are clenched tight over the tacky steering wheel, knuckles white and numb from squeezing as hard as they are. She can’t stop wincing whenever she hits a curve too hard or shifts gears too suddenly.

“That’s it, maggot, a little more,” Ronan grunts, hand settling over Blue’s on the gear shift just as she blows past 115. They round a bend entirely too fast for safety but Blue’s heart is racing and everything is that odd Technicolor that important things usually are. Ronan’s fingers tense over her own and she shifts down to fourth, hitting the clutch just before breaking into a drift, BMW blowing past a speed limit sign that they’re blowing past too fast to see. “Hit the gas, _hit the fucking gas!_ ”

Blue does as instructed, forcing herself to keep her eyes open as they go over a huge pothole. Ronan yells a word that Blue wasn’t aware was a curse as they hit it head on, then zoom on past.

“Fuck,” he breathes as they head down an open stretch, speedometer reflecting that they’re slowing to more manageable speeds as ninety-two in what has to be a fifty. She hits the break once they get to seventy and coasts them towards the grassy patches at the edge of the highway. “Fuck,” he repeats when they come to a stop.

“Yeah,” she replies, leaning her head against the wheel and breathing in slowly.

She closes her eyes, but she can hear Ronan digging his phone out of his pocket and checking the stopwatch. After a moment, he starts laughing these gasping, horrible wheezes that eventually find their way out of Blue’s own throat.

They calm down a few moments later, and that’s when Ronan shows her the time.

“Faster than fucking Kavinsky, Blue,” he says, mirthful enough to give her one of his rare smiles. “Faster than _me_.”

And that startles another laugh out of her chest. “Fuck,” she gasps, clutching the wheel and muffling her laughs in the crook of her elbow. Ronan flings an arm over her shoulders and pulls her in as close as he can with the armrest between them. “I told you I could learn.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he ruffles her hair a bit before shoving her away and kicking his feet up onto the dash. “Let’s see if you can do it again,” he says, saving the time and setting up another round on his phone.

She tugs at the parking break until it releases and shifts to drive before giving him a wry grin. He returns it after a moment, and then he tells her to quit being such a goddamn asshole and fucking do it already. She flips him the bird before pulling the car through a U-turn and revving the engine a little bit, just to see Ronan grit his teeth and groan, “the _belt_ ,” under his breath.

The sky is as clear as it gets in the Henrietta fall; sparse clouds cling to the black sheet of sky, stars occasionally blinking hello’s down at those who are looking, the moon a pale smudge behind dense, grey clouds that carry the promise of winter. She glances towards the mountains in the distance, then at Ronan, relaxed in a way she’s rarely seen, out of the corner of her eye, before grabbing for the stick and releasing the clutch, then squeezes her hands over the wheel and takes off again.

* * *

“Okay, fine, just _sit still_.”

Blue fidgets a bit under Noah’s hands as he pins the flowers they found behind Monmouth Manufacturing in her hair. It’s been difficult; Blue’s hair is obviously home-chopped, emphasis on _chopped_. It sticks up on tufts around her head, making her look like a goofy, black sun with the remnants of violet dye at the ends of her hair.

Of course, he thinks she’s beautiful because Blue _is_ beautiful.

Still, she’s difficult. He lifts a curling strand, unusually dainty in her nest of spikes, and loops a branch of mint through it. He clips it still with one of the thirty-one clips he found clinging desperately to her; that is, he found fifteen in her hair, and she plucked the remaining sixteen from her outfit and boots.

She blinks at him in the mirror. “I never got into the whole flower crown thing that was popular a while ago,” she says. Then, she wrinkles her nose. “A lot of people used those store-bought ones anyways, so it wasn’t like I was missing out on anything.” She frowns a bit when Noah tugs another strand flat before weaving a daisy through the loop he’d made of the end of a lavender stalk.

“It was popular a few years before I really gave a shit about those things,” Noah replies, remembering one of his cousins wearing the damned metal things like they were going out of style. He supposes they eventually did, but made a comeback. “Glittery eyeshadow was in at the time. Blue, you should’ve seen me.”

“Yeah?” she asks, eyes sparking with cautious curiosity.

He doesn’t like the caution, but he likes the curiosity. He likes Blue, too; Blue’s a curious creature by nature. Curious in her thinking, curious in her existing, curious in her abilities. She’s a mystery as much as he is, as much as Gansey, Adam, or Ronan are. She’s also curious in the way that warrants lots of questions and lots of idle research of mundane things.

“Yeah,” he says. “This one kid, he had to have been a senior when I started it, used to stop me in the hall to give me these truly horrendous palettes,” he pauses, remembering the shy way he’d blushed, the warm, almost electric press of his hand against the back of Noah’s. “I wore them every day until they ran out, ended up starting a trend among the Aglionby sophomore class.”

Blue giggles, ducking her head when Noah nudges it forward. “I bet that was something to see.”

He snorts because it was. Sure, there were other kids who didn’t give two damns about gender norms and related business, but he was famous for it. Modifying his uniform so he had pastel blue patches at the elbows of his sweater, dyeing his hair with fruits and juices, learning to make perfumes to reflect his moods; he was a regular outcast, talked to sparingly but lusted after constantly.

He tells Blue about how he was voted ‘most likely to be a witch’ three years in a row, and he didn’t bother to find out what he was voted senior year. He probably wouldn’t like it anyways.

“You know,” Blue interrupts, probably noticing his discomfort and the way he can feel himself getting more cloudy than usual. “I do know a thing or two about makeup.”

He smirks down at her as he weaves a grapevine, sans grapes, around the crown he’d arranged. “Oh yeah?” he asks, grabbing for the tiny flowers they’d picked out growing in the cracks of the pavement.

“One does not simply grow up with Orla Sargent without picking up a few tricks,” she says, though she frowns right after. “ _Useful_ tricks,” she emphasizes, though Noah couldn’t care less what she picks up from her cousin. Orla may be strange in a uniquely “not Blue” way, but he still thinks she’s interesting at the very least.

“And makeup happened to be one of those tricks,” he says, finishing putting the little flowers in Blue’s hair and helping her stand as best he can with his wobbly, transparent nature.

She nods, fixing her dress and glancing at his work in the mirror. After a moment, she grins, and then turns around to fling her arms around Noah’s shoulders. Another thing about Blue is how warm she is; as often as he’d been hugged since he died (that is, rarely), Blue’s hugs are among the best. She’s small, smells faintly of patchouli and spicy tea, and tends to let her hands linger even when she pulls away.

She does just that this time.

Her grin is contagious as she steps back, tugging on her sleeve. “I bet I could engineer some glittery eyeshadow that would work for even the most ghostly of glitter fanatics.”

He smiles back at her, and reaches over to squeeze her hand.

“I’m looking forward to being your test subject.”

* * *

He startles awake when something crashes to the floor, followed by a quiet _oof!_

Adam reaches over to the lamp on his improvised bedside table and finds a very bemused, very frustrated looking Noah blinking owlishly back at him, lips pursed, eyebrows raised, nose wrinkled. He looks a bit like a cat that had slipped into a pail of water, and Adam can’t stop himself from snorting at the image before Noah looks away.

“What am I doing here?” Noah asks, pushing himself off the floor and walking over to flop onto the end of Adam’s bed.

Adam shoves his covers to his ankles, figuring he’s probably not going to get anymore sleep for the rest of the night. The secondhand clock by his lamp suggests that it’s almost six, though the darkness of the sky outside of his window proposes that it’s much closer to four than it is to six.

He glances back at Noah and replies, “I could ask you the same thing.”

Noah wrinkles his knows and surveys the room with his too-keen eyes, observing and cataloguing everything from Adam’s face to the dust on the mantle above the place where a fireplace should be, to the Aglionby uniform, neatly stitched and pressed flat and flung over the back of his uncomfortable wooden chair. His eyes pause at something at the end of Adam’s bed, and it takes a few moments for his sleep-drunk mind to remember Ronan’s messenger bag and brogues left here for when he stops by to pick up Adam in the morning.

He can feel himself blushing and he tries, he _tries_ , to will it out of existence.

He knows he fails when Noah’s eyes shift up to his and, slowly, he smirks like the goddamn Cheshire cat. Adam watches him reach down to the floor by his feet and grab a shoe, experimentally tugging on the worn laces before he’s looking back at Adam with a raised eyebrow.

Of course, Adam couldn’t lie his way out of an explanation if he wanted to, but he gives it a try nonetheless. “It’s a friend’s-” he starts, waving his hands about uncomfortably. It’s strange, he thinks, to be open about him and Ronan. Rather, it’s strange to be open about _him-and-Ronan_ with someone besides Blue, and even that is shrouded in sly smiles and unspoken words.

“A _friend’s_ ,” Noah remarks, interrupting with feigned disinterest. “Tell me, Adam, do you have Gansey over late at night to do things that needn’t be spoken almost every night of the week? Or is this a greywaren-magician exclusive relationship.”

Adam sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “It’s-”

“Exactly what I think and we both know it,” Noah interrupts, again. He has an annoying habit of it, especially recently. Ronan had mentioned once that he thought Blue was rubbing off on him, and at first Adam hadn’t believed him, but now he sees it. “And I don’t mind,” he adds, glancing at his nails and pursing his lips.

“Well, good,” Adam replies, because lying to Noah would probably be more embarrassing than the truth, despite the heat in his face and the way his body screams for him to sprint out of the room.

“Good,” Noah echoes, grinning a little. “It is good, you know. Ronan. Ronan is good.”

Adam nods.

“And so are you,” Noah says, fiddling with the laces again.

“Thanks for your vote of confidence.”

“I wish you two the best in your sexual escapades and romantic adventures,” Noah digs, obviously trying to get Adam riled up. He hates that it’s working.

He flops backwards onto his pillow and squeezes his eyes shut. “Noah,” he starts. “As much as I appreciate your interest in any and all of my relationships, I do have work in the morning, and while I’m not going to throw you out of a window, I am more than willing to play crappy country music until you let me sleep.”

Noah stands, though he gives a snarky little salute. “Of course,” he replies. “I’ll head out.” He turns towards the door; not his usual approach, though Adam’s grateful for it. There’s always something eerie about watching Noah fade into nothingness, like dropping a stone into very, very deep water and watching it disappear beneath the dark surface.

He has a hand on the door when he turns around with one of his playful grins and winks before saying, “And just so you know, Ronan’s really into being held down.”

“Goodnight, Noah,” Adam says pointedly, feeling the blush return to his cheeks with a vengeance.

Noah grins and waves before stepping out the door and shutting it close behind him. Adam waits for footsteps, but remembers that he wouldn’t hear any even if he tried. He reaches over to flick off his lamp before pulling the covers back up to his chin, shutting his eyes to thoughts of snarky smiles and warm hands resting on his hips.

Sometimes, Adam thinks, Noah is too perceptive for his own good.

**Author's Note:**

> yell at me on [tumblr](http://frouvaire.tumblr.com).
> 
> title stolen from 'i think ur a contra' by vampire weekend.


End file.
